Announcements

SingularLabs has used display advertising as a source of revenue for almost a decade. Today we’re announcing that due to the growing success of our Pro Club, we will no longer be displaying ads on our website. We will also continue offering all of our software products completely free from 3rd-party ads.

Furthermore, we’ve worked hard to simplify our privacy policy, which details how we handle data collected by our website, and what is shared with third-party services. In short, no personally identifiable information is collected through normal use of our website or products.

Due to recent privacy concerns affecting one of our competitors, this month we’ve been frequently asked whether our products—specifically System Ninja—collects usage data or runs perpetually in the background. System Ninja does not collect any usage information, nor does it continue running in the background when closed. It will connect to our servers when launched to perform an update check, however this feature can be disabled in settings.

If you would like to support SingularLabs, please consider joining our Pro Club. In addition to funding further software development efforts, you’ll have access to additional software features and priority technical support.

Several months ago we opened a survey to gather feedback on our products and to help make a few decisions. I’d like to share the results of that survey with you and respond to a handful of the comments made.

Question 1: Should we offer an installer for CCEnhancer?

The result of this first question came as a bit of a surprise. Only one person had ever suggested offering an install-able edition CCEnhancer, so we assumed there was very little demand for such a thing. Following this result, we will be offering an installer with all future CCEnhancer releases.

Question 2: Should System Ninja clean beta versions of web browsers?

Neither option was able to attain a majority of votes, so we’re going to maintain the status quo. System Ninja will only clean stable versions of web browsers, but continue to allow users to manually add beta versions with the functions available under Options → Scan Inclusions.

Question 3: Do you think JavaRa still has value and that development should re-commence?

No surprises here. JavaRa has been deprecated for a couple of years now and the current JRE installer seems to be doing a solid job removing old versions. Development will not re-commence.

General Feedback

There were two topics raised several time in the general feedback section that I’d like to address.

Offer lifetime licenses This won’t happen. Offering free support and updates into perpetuity is not a sustainable business model. Our subscription model provides us with a consistent flow of revenue so we can continue to invest in product improvements and sustain our support efforts.

Bring back System Ninja Portable The security improvements in Windows 10 made it necessary to unblock portable executable files or programs contained in .zip files. We tried providing instructions, but a substantial number of users didn’t read or understand them and this became a significant support burden. We made the decision to only offer portable System Ninja to Pro Club members.

Free users can still roll their own portable System Ninja edition by copying all of the files in C:\Program Files (x86)\System Ninja to a new folder and deleting the uninstaller’s executables.

Usually we update the localization files when we release a new version of an app. Since some of our titles aren’t expected to receive an update for quite a while, we decided to release the language files a little earlier to help out our international users.(more…)

JavaRa was created because the Java updater did not remove old and obsolete versions of the JRE, leaving security vulnerabilities in place. The latest versions of Java now completely uninstall outdated and insecure versions, with roughly the same effectiveness as JavaRa.

Now that Oracle has taken responsibility for this problem, JavaRa isn’t really needed anymore. We have decided to cease JavaRa development and will no longer be providing definition updates after December 18th 2014. Pro Club members will still receive support for JavaRa for at least a year.